By LUCY ORMONDE
Nicky Lavigne always thought she’d be married with kids by the time she reached 40. In reality however, on her 40th birthday she found herself divorced, single and childless and desperate to become a mother.
A woman’s fertility declines after the age of 32. By the age of 40, it’s fallen by half. Waiting for the father of your future children to come into your life is no longer an option.
Nicky realised she had a choice to make. She could continue to wait for a relationship that may or may not lead to children. Or she could look into becoming a single mother through treatments like IVF and intrauterine insemination.
It took Nicky five years of fertility treatments and donor sperm to get nowhere. Until this year.
Now she’s 45 and 19 weeks pregnant. With twins.
Nicky is one of a growing number of women who are being labelled as ‘socially infertile’ by the IVF industry. They’re women in their late 30s and early 40s who are using donor sperm and fertility treatment to become mothers. Some, of course, are also medically infertile; their eggs are no longer viable, as was the case with Nicky.
According to recent reports, the number of single women using sperm donors to get pregnant has increased by as much as 10 per cent in the past three years.
Although lesbian couples account for some of the increase, doctors say the real growth is among older single heterosexual women.
”We’re seeing more and more of these ladies. Women who can’t find Mr Right but still want a child realise this is an option for them,” the deputy president of the Fertility Society of Australia, Michael Chapman, said. ”It’s become almost normal to be a single mum. So when these women get to 38, 39, they go to donor sperm and do assisted reproduction.’
MM: At what point did you realise this was the path you were going to go down?
NL: By 40 I had always thought I would be married with a couple of kids but in the real world, I was actually divorced, single and childless. Everyone I had ever come into contact with knew how much I wanted children, so a girlfriend suggested I look into using a sperm donor. I shot this down fast because it wasn’t part of my “dream life”. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised my “fertility window” was closing and I needed to do something fast, so I started looking into what using a sperm donor involved.